E-Musings Mon Immorata

The Internet's Still an Interesting Place to Be When sitting back and (virtually) smelling the roses, I usually chance across interesting stuff. The only problem with the daily information deluge is dealing with it. This even after cutting back on the newsletters subscribed. Or sites visited to mark overnight change. I usually put off reading personal messages and newsletters until the weekend. So while monitoring simultaneous PCQ Linux and Windows 2003 .Net Enterprise installs I decided to rock. Calculate Spam's ROI? Found an interesting Spam Calculator from Trend Micro. This maps employees with spam received (as a percentage), and adds IT maintenance service costs to generate per-employee and annual organization spam costs. To use this on-line service, you may need to complete a form. But once done data sharing, calculate the ROI (return on investment) expended on spam control. Although the calculator works in dollars, use your local currency costs. And replace the currency symbol with your own when using the figures generated. The example I used was for my company:

• 20 souls
• average annual salary of Rs 120,000
• receive 40 mails a day
• of which 60% are spam or junk
• 10 hours per month on IT-related activities
• IT person's salary identical to other employees average

The calculator estimated per person spam handling costs at Rs 350 using 3 seconds per message for a 220-working day average. The cost of spam for IT services was Rs 8,182. And the total cost to organization was Rs 15,182. But my cost savings using Trends anti-spam solutions were a mere Rs 760. Evidently, my organization doesn't have a spam problem. Oh happy day! But if we had 3000 or more users with all other costs constant, savings with spam-control would exceed Rs 50,000! Ye Olde Faithful As for the virus stuff, there's nothing high-risk this week. Although I'm reconsidering my rather over-the-top approval of Alwil's Avast anti-virus program. I had two versions running -- one on a 256 MB box, the other on 64 MB system -- with Windows 2000 SP2. The former has no startup issues and comes on-line in under 1 minute. The latter would lockup for as long as 15 minutes! Before even getting to the system login. The problem appeared to be a process "ashserv" that uses 80% of system resources and manage to cause 100% CPU usage too. Disabling Avast on the 64 MB box made boot ups happen in little over a minute. So I killed the product since it wasn't really doing me much good. I subsequently dabbled with the new AVG Antivirus 7 trial. The free version is still stuck at v6.5. Again, the interface was so unintuitive that scanning a floppy took me 10 minutes to understand how to do it. And the last straw was AVG's inability to detect, or block, the industry-standard Virus test EICAR from being accessed. So I zapped it too. And rolled back to PC-cillin 2000. Windows Workout Unrelated to the previous item is (or was) my home Windows 2k box getting slower by the day. Part of the problem seems to have been too many beta software being installed then removed. And what seems to be (in retrospect) a severe case of registry bloat. Coincidentally, there appears to be a problem with Windows 2k Service Pack 2 system. In the past 10 days, 4 such systems that were all coincidentally setup within hours of one another started experiencing boot up problems. In 3 instances, reformatting the primary disk and reinstalling Windows seemed to do the trick and all 3 are in a "Go" state right now. I wonder if Microsoft built in a time bomb into Windows 2k. And possibly into SP2. Because a fifth Win2k PC which was upgraded 2 weeks ago with SP4 didn't fail! Is Kewl On the free software front there's a new Firebird v0.6.1 build that brings several interface and feature improvements. But when installing make sure not to install over a previous version. And for the first run use the profile manager (start|Run "..\mozillaFirebird.exe -p"). The new build seems to have improved cache access even when offline. And the list of 3rd-party extensions available has grown too. I liked TTLO (Things They Left Out) that adds productivity features including using the mouse-wheel to scroll a line at a time, enlarge text or scroll through the History. Another cool add-in the Mycroft search extensions. Firebird also supports theme. But the included one works for me. Un-Kewl :( There's also a new Thunderbird 0.1 mail and news client available too. It's based on the module included with Netscape (and Mozilla). I had tested an earlier version. But rejected it after being unable to configure an IMAP server account. Or for that matter, multiple mail accounts. The new build in true Mozilla tradition is available as a Zip download of just 8.9 MB! Builds are available for Linux, MacOS, and Win32. Feature enhancements customizable tool bars, separate UI extensions, themes support, easy mail compose (similar to Opera M2 but more intuitive and simplified menus. Of course, I do have to test to see whether Thunderbird is good or still needs more work. However, as before I couldn't setup an IMAP account. Or a POP3. Or anything that required a password to access the server. I'm sure there's an answer somewhere. But I don't have the patience or time to figure out how to make it work. I'll stick with Popcorn and Outlook Express for now. Thank you very much. That's it for now. Next week, people.